Hi everyone!
I’m here today to announce that I’ve decided to start a Devlog Series for my game Growing Horrors!
I’ve been wanting to do a Devlog Series for a while now as a way to document my progress, but never really got enough willpower to do it. Well, I’m hoping to change that today!
For this Devlog Zero I want to talk a bit about how the idea for the game came to be, and what are my plans for it. Then, without further ado…
The Idea
I’ve been creating games for almost a decade now, but I’ve been mostly just creating small prototypes or projects for clients, but with the years passing by faster and faster, I’ve started to question myself what I really want to do with my life: Do I really want to create games for other people until I die?
Well, the answer is “No” and, in fact, it was always “No”.
But life gets in the way and priorities change, so making games for myself was always more of a hobby and a way for me to improve my skills more than anything, even though I’ve always wanted to do it for a living (like many others). But around 4 years ago, a collegue of mine released their game, called Unsighted. I actually saw and played the alpha version of it, and seeing it not only become a pretty good game, but also be pretty successfull game was really cool, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me a bit jealous. It made me start to think “Why am I not doing that?”.
Now I could go on and on about how Brazil doesn’t have many incentives or oportunities for game developers and how this collegue was an exception to the rule, but that’s beside the point. As you might’ve noticed, it’s been 4 years since then and I still haven’t released anything. I’m actually really close to releasing my first game, Waving Around, but that was a (not so) small project I decided to create more for portfolio reasons than anything else. But since that day, I have been thinking about what kind of game I wanted to make, and I’ve been writting all my ideas down, even if they aren’t very good. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get an epiphany and get a good idea.
And that was more or less exactly what happened.
On a random day around 1 year ago I was eating a burguer with my girlfriend and talking about random stuff, and one of topics was about me wanting to get a publisher to support the creation of a game. But to get that, I needed to have a good game, and although I had a good prototype for another idea at the time, it didn’t feel like it was THE game (I still want to revist it one day, though). At that point, for some reason I don’t remember now, she mentioned Stardew Valley, a game both of us love and have hundreds of hours of playtime (she has WAY more than me) and, at the same time, I remembered a video I’ve watched a while ago saying that every developer should develop an Horror Game at least once. At that point, it clicked: what about a Farming… Horror game?
I really like Stardew Valley, and while I haven’t played a lot of horror games, there were a few that I really liked, like Darkwood. A mix of the two sounded pretty cool, and I had never seen anything like that before. From that point on, the conversation just started to flow, with more and more ideas forming. And that’s how Growing Horrors (a pun of the idea of growing plants, and how the horrors around you gets more and more frequent with each passing day) came to be.
My Expectations
Now, while a Farming and Horror game is really not something very commom, I was not the first to think about it. Other games with these themes already exists (like We Harvest Shadows or Welcome to Elderfield), but none of them looks like what I had in my head, which is something like Darkwood with Farming. The closest (and only) game that get pretty close to this is Grave Seasons, but even that, they seems to lean more to the “cute/pretty” side of things, and the farming aspect seems secondary, with the story being the primary focus (at least that’s the idea I get from the trailer). That’s not what I want, I want heavy, dark graphics, I want tension, I want the player to question things and be scared of even leaving their house.
So, I still think I have a pretty unique idea in my hands, one that no one ever made in this way. As a bonus, it also seems like this is a very unexplored market, and if the number of wishlists on the games I mentioned before is anything to go by, it seems like there’s a demand for something on this weird mix of genres.
Also, if you didn’t know, I’ve decided to put this idea to test a couple of months ago when I received an email about a competition called Rising Tide Challenge, and with nothing but the idea and a few friends to help me make a trailer, I actually ended up being one of the winners! So, this felt like confirmation that this idea has potential.
Where we are today
Reality hit hard when we decided to make the Pitch for the game: to achieve the game I’m envisioning, the scope ended up pretty big, and if we (me and my friends who helped with the trailer) are gonna look for investment, we’ll need a decent amount of money. Blue Ocean Games (or BOG, the ones responsible for organizing the Rising Tide Challenge) was offering a max of 300.000 USD, which is a bit shorter than our ideal investment. Also, since they’re doing high risk investment, their contract has some terms that didn’t sound very great. It puts a lot of responsabilities on the back of the developers, and there’s some terms that sounds more like chains than a partnership.
So, ultimately we’ve decided to take advantage of the fact that BOG didn’t give us a deadline for the pitch and first try to pitch the game to other publishers to see if we can get a better deal. If all else fails, we can try BOG and see how it goes (in fact, it sounded like BOG approved this approach?).
The “bad” thing about this approach is that while BOG only required a trailer, if we want to pitch to a publisher, we need to actually have something playable. So that’s what we’ve been doing these days. Or, well, that’s what I’ve been doings these days, at least.
You see, this game is my idea. My friends helped me create the RTC trailer because I asked them, and it was kinda of a “Month-long Game Jam Project” for us. We didn’t really think we would win. But, while my friends do believe the game has some potential, we haven’t created it together. I have dozens of pages with ideas for this game, which kinda makes me the “idea guy”, and no one likes the idea guy (unless they can pay you good money, which I don’t have). While a bit disheartening, I can’t blame them: being all adults with busy lives, it’s hard to invest your free time on something you don’t love, specially when each of us have our own ideas we would rather be working on.
So, that brings us to today: my current objective is to make a playable prototype of the game, not only for the publishers, but also to try and convince my friends it can be fun to work on this game. And, in all honesty, I also to prove to myself this game is not only good on paper. I really do believe this game has great potential, but I still have some doubts about how well certain things will work when put together, and I’m really scared I won’t be able to bring all this potential out.
On thing I’m sure is that I know I can’t do it alone.
Final Thoughts
Well, there you go, my first Devlog ever. I probably ranted a lot, and there was basically no dev-related stuff, but that’s why this is chapter zero haha
I’m hoping to write one of these at least once a month, but we’ll see. On the next one I’ll try to get a bit more technical and show a bit more about the process behind the RTC trailer, and maybe even what I’ve actually been working on. Spoiler alert: very early stuff. But hopefully, by documenting the process here, it’ll help me (and you, dear reader) see how the game is progressings.
Well, I don’t know what else to say so… See you on the next entry!